Sunday, September 1, 2024
Barn theatre, CirencesterMarie Jones’s 1996 hit play is given a spectacular, Hollywood-style makeover by her son Matthew McElhinney, though the momentum of the drama suffers
Throw a stone …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:54AMSunday, August 25, 2024
The Mill at Sonning, ReadingA fine ensemble cast deliver plenty of laughs and more in Robin Herford’s terrific production of the playwright’s intertwined tale of three couples
Reviewing …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:54AMSunday, August 18, 2024
Ustinov Studio, BathDirector Richard Jones tries to capture the menace felt by the play’s first audiences, but the result is overmannered
Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party was almost un…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:30AMSunday, August 4, 2024
Williamson Park, LancasterAndrew Pollard turns Lewis Carroll’s classic into a delightful quest, tirelessly acted and cleverly designed
We are sitting in a wooded dell, ranged on felled tre…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:30AMSunday, July 28, 2024
Watermill theatre, NewburyThere are somersaults, pivots and tumbles aplenty in this gleeful tribute to the 19th-century circus showman turned politician
Barnum dances a tightrope between con…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06AMSunday, July 21, 2024
Black Box; Town Hall theatre, GalwayA family reunion unravels with viciousness and humour in Mark O’Rowe’s new play. And Garry Hynes’s searing direction makes Beckett new
Since it laun…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:18AMSunday, July 14, 2024
Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-AvonSheridan’s comedy of manners is given an all too knowing makeover in Tinuke Craig’s fitfully amusing new production
Richard Brinsley Sherida…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:32AMSunday, July 7, 2024
Tron, GlasgowA couple stop at nothing to secure their first home in Johnny McKnight’s deliciously fast-paced production of Philip Ridley’s Faustian black comedy
The theme underpinning Ph…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:36AMSunday, June 23, 2024
A two-year celebration of the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses culminates in a women-led, cross-border, multidisciplinary festival dedicated to the novel’s main female character
On a g…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:36AMSunday, June 16, 2024
Leeds PlayhouseOpera North brings shimmering music to this gorgeous and crisply choreographed co-production, which preserves Shaw’s critique of the British class system
Some have called it…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:36AMSunday, June 9, 2024
Watermill, NewburyCalum Finlay’s fast-moving comedy about the composer and her struggles to be recognised is pitch-perfectly performed
Felix is working out an idea at the piano. What does …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:42AMSunday, June 2, 2024
Live theatre, NewcastleStewart Pringle’s new play set in Northumberland in 1553 has the bones of something great, but at present teeters on parody
Newcastle’s Live theatre is 51 this yea…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:36AMSunday, May 26, 2024
Belgrade theatre, CoventryThree women push themselves beyond the local swimming pool and into the unknown in Siana Bangura’s buoyant, enlightening new play
Three women “in their prime”…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:02AMSunday, May 19, 2024
The Other Place, Stratford-upon-AvonThe RSC’s European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning play tailors its intriguing characters a little too neatly
Daniel Evans and Tamar…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:48AMSunday, May 5, 2024
York St John University, YorkFootsbarn Travelling Theatre’s Twelfth Night and a Turkish Macbeth rubbed shoulders with manga, memoir and a Ukrainian scratch show at this boundary-defying fe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:54AMSunday, April 28, 2024
Dundee RepMorna Young’s new adaptation, directed by Finn den Hertog, captures the earthiness of rural life in early 1900s Scotland, but it needs to dig deeper
In front of a backdrop sugges…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:02AMSunday, April 21, 2024
New Vic, Newcastle-under-LymeA first-rate cast delight in controlled chaos of the highest order in Conrad Nelson’s seamless revival of Richard Bean’s hit play
A couple on the stairs behi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:02AMSunday, April 14, 2024
The Studio, Edinburgh, and touringThe fifth of Rona Munro’s James plays fails to develop an interesting premise about a hidden romance
A dark stage is lapped by flickering candles. Here, f…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:32AMSunday, March 31, 2024
Leeds Playhouse and touringThe company’s trademark fusion of live performance and digital wizardry doesn’t quite hang together in a radical take on Mary Shelley
The structure of Mary She…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:42AMSunday, March 24, 2024
Cast, DoncasterElvi Piper’s fine revival of Boff Whalley’s 2014 musical comedy about three sisters on a pit village frontline in 1984 is full of humour, drama and lived experience
Boff W…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:02AMSunday, March 17, 2024
Shakespeare North Playhouse, PrescotHistorical novelist Philippa Gregory has fun reframing the notorious Richard III and the women in his life in her first play
From a hole in the stage, a v…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:06AMSunday, March 10, 2024
Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-AvonSamuel Barnett and Victoria Yeates harmonise as the composer and his ‘assistant’ in a production that sings under the direction of Erica Whyman
Erica Why…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:36AMSunday, March 3, 2024
Birmingham RepA university bhangra dance team is torn apart by cultural differences, seamlessly expressed through music and movement, in this zinger of a show
Councillor Liz Clements cried l…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:02AMSunday, February 25, 2024
Royal Exchange, ManchesterInspired by Cornelia Parker famous artwork, and tracking three couples across three decades, Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s play is a clever concept that never catches fi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:24AMSunday, February 18, 2024
New Vic, Newcastle-under-LymeA top cast directed by Caroline Wilkes revel in Ron Hutchinson’s laugh-out-loud, if overlong story charting the corporation’s first wireless play
In the earl…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:42AMSunday, February 11, 2024
Barn theatre, Cirencester; Watermill theatre, NewburyThe deductive powers of the famous sleuth are put to new uses in these inventive if patchy interpretations, one playful, the other musica…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:42AMSunday, February 4, 2024
Playhouse, SheffieldArchers actor Katie Redford captures the ever-shifting mix of love and pain between parent and child in her conversation-starting theatrical soap opera
In a recent interv…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:54AMSunday, January 28, 2024
Royal & Derngate, NorthamptonThe physical comedy ensemble revives the ancient Greek play in an audacious staging with a tragicomic present-day backstory
The keynotes of the time are chao…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:32AMSunday, January 14, 2024
The Mill at Sonning, ReadingThe stage adaptation of the Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra film is brought to life by a full-of-verve cast in Joseph Pitcher’s fine revival
In the g…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:48AMSunday, December 24, 2023
Our roving critic’s highlights include a bravura O’Casey trilogy, a Lionel Bart classic that delivered more, and a perfectly cast portrait of a marriage
Read the Observer critics’ revi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:06PMSunday, December 17, 2023
Curve, Leicester; Sherman theatre, CardiffThe action feels distanced in Nikolai Foster’s coolly striking new production of the Lloyd Webber-Rice musical, while turmoil stalks the Darling h…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06AM 
